Indirect question.Questions that are reported rather than stated directly are called “indirect questions They are not followed by question marks but by periods: My roommate asked what I thought But My roommate asked, What do you think ” Interrogative pronouns like what often signal an indirect question and take the place of any punctuation that might mark a question. See also pronouns. Indirect quotation. Like indirect questions, indirect quotations talk about someone’s speech but don’t record it directly The reporter said that the politician made a speech No quotation marks set o words reported in indirect quotations. But The reporter said, The politician made a speech ” The word “that” is the most common signal that speech is being reported indirectly rather than being quoted directly. However, sentences that include that can report speech directly and thus use quotation marks in place of the more common comma that sets o direct quotes: “Tolstoy never said that war is hell It was Clausewitz who said, War is hell Note that the second example—with a comma—requires capitalizationof the rst word of the quoted sentence. The rst example quotes only a fragment of speech and introduces it with that which means that no capitalization is required.
